Funeral Attendants

A median of $35,680 against the $50,020 all-occupation figure leaves Funeral Attendants 29% behind — $14,340 across a year. Whether that is workable depends almost entirely on where you would be doing it.

31,090 people do this work nationally. That is the size at which Funeral Attendants becomes a career rather than a post — enough employers in a normal city that leaving one of them is a decision rather than a crisis.

Funeral service suits people who can be composed and organised around other people’s worst week, repeatedly, and be available at hours nobody chooses.

No verified preparation time is on file for Funeral Attendants. The wage survey behind every figure on this page asks employers what they pay, not what they required, so the honest answer here is that we do not know.

Between $30,380 and $42,870 there is $12,490, a ratio of 1.4x. Tight distributions are predictable, and predictable cuts both ways: little risk of being badly underpaid, little prospect of doing much better.

Under $30,380 is where a quarter of this field sits, $19,640 beneath the $50,020 a typical American job pays. The risk in Funeral Attendants is not the average outcome, it is how long you might spend in the bottom quarter before leaving it.

Avoid it if you cannot be on call for the unscheduled, or if sustained proximity to grief would accumulate on you.

No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 31,090 figure counts people already working as Funeral Attendants, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.

$30,380 to $42,870 is a 1.4x range. Ranges this tight usually mean the employer set is homogeneous — the same kind of organisation paying the same kind of scale — so the lever you have is geography rather than employer.

Put in money rather than ratios: $30,380 at the 25th percentile, $35,680 at the midpoint, $42,870 at the 75th. $12,490 separates the quarter of Funeral Attendants at the bottom from the quarter at the top.

Between $30,380 and $42,870 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $35,680. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $7,190; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $12,490.

$7,190 separates $35,680 from the $42,870 top quarter, while only $5,300 separates it from $30,380. The range leans upward, which means the middle of Funeral Attendants has more room above it than a symmetric reading of the median would suggest.

Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $17.15 at the midpoint for Funeral Attendants, $14.60 at the 25th percentile and $20.61 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.